Principal Site Reliability Engineer; SRE

Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Los Angeles, CA or Remote

InStride is a public benefit corporation

Partner with leading employers to unlock opportunities for their employees through access to education programs. Our mission is to empower partners and their employees to advance careers, elevate expertise, and achieve meaningful growth. If you are passionate about making a difference and driving educational and professional advancement, InStride is the place for you.

Candidates must be located in one of the following states to be considered eligible for employment: AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, IL, IN, KS, LA, MD, MA, MI, MO, NV, NH, NJ, NY, PA, OH, OR, TX, VA, WA, WI.

We’re looking for a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join InStride’s growing engineering team. This is a highly technical role for an individual contributor who thrives at the intersection of cloud architecture, automation, and reliability engineering. You will be the go-to AWS expert for complex initiatives, setting technical direction, and raising the bar for operational excellence across our platform. Every system you design, every automation you implement, and every safeguard you put in place will directly support our mission of expanding access to life-changing education for working adults around the globe.

• Cloud Architecture & Strategy:
  Design and optimize AWS environments that balance scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency for enterprise workloads.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship:
  Guide engineers on best practices in Kubernetes, Dev Sec Ops , and AWS-native design patterns.
• Infrastructure as Code Mastery:
  Build reusable IaC libraries with AWS CDK, Terraform, or Cloud Formation to standardize deployments.
• Security & Compliance by Design:
  Enforce least-privilege IAM, encryption-by-default, and policy-as-code guardrails to meet security and regulatory standards.
• Observability & Reliability Engineering:
  Define SLIs/SLOs, manage error budgets, and implement monitoring strategies with Prometheus, Grafana, and AWS-native tools.
• CI/CD Excellence:
  Optimize automated pipelines with Harness and Git Hub, enabling faster, safer, and more reliable software delivery.
• Networking & Resilience:
  Architect secure, performant VPCs, load balancing, and multi-region failover strategies with AWS networking services.
• Automation & Self-Service Enablement:
  Deliver developer-friendly automation and Internal Developer Portal (IDP) capabilities that empower teams to provision infrastructure without SRE intervention.

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, Dev Ops, or Platform Engineering roles operating production AWS workloads.
• Hands-on expertise with AWS EKS, Kubernetes networking, Helm, autoscaling frameworks (Karpenter/Cluster Autoscaler), serverless architectures, and API Gateways.
• Proven delivery of service mesh solutions (Istio, Linkerd, or AWS App Mesh) for secure and observable service-to-service communication.
• Proficiency with IaC using AWS CDK (Type Script preferred/Python), Terraform, or Cloud Formation.
• Strong programming and automation skills in Go, Python, or Type Script, with Bash as well.
• Demonstrated experience implementing policy-as-code with OPA/Rego or similar tooling integrated into CI/CD pipelines.
• Solid understanding of SLI/SLO/error-budget methodologies and hands-on experience with monitoring and alerting stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Watch, Groundcover).
• Deep knowledge of AWS security best practices, including IAM policies, encryption, OS hardening, and compliance enforcement.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate reliability metrics into business impact and guide incident/post-mortem discussions.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing enterprise AWS and Dev Ops strategies without direct management responsibilities.
• Familiarity with Internal Developer Portals (Backstage, Port, Cortex) and self-service automation is a strong plus.

• Elevate platform reliability:
  Design and operate multi-region, fault-tolerant systems that ensure InStride’s learning platform is always available for learners and partners.
• Advance…